


TEOTWAWKI (And I Feel Fine)

by mrasaki



Category: Star Trek (2009), Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Horror, M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Survival, Zombies, love among the ruins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-17
Updated: 2011-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-27 11:53:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrasaki/pseuds/mrasaki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zombie AU. For the holiday fic comm <a href="http://space-wrapped.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://space-wrapped.livejournal.com/"><b>space_wrapped</b></a> prompt, <i>It's been nineteen months since the zombie apocalypse began and all Leonard McCoy wants for Christmas is one day without worrying about killing or being killed.</i> (But not Christmas specific.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	TEOTWAWKI (And I Feel Fine)

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Um, zombies. Some graphic imagery. Also, minor chara death.
> 
> A/N: Many thanks to my beta, [starsandgraces](http://starsandgraces.livejournal.com/), and my last-minute cheerleader, [echoinautumn](http://echoinautumn.livejournal.com/), who helped more than they know.
> 
> *TEOTWAWKI = "The End of the World As We Know It"
> 
> The title is a riff on the REM song. And the acronym is common, I think, but originally learned of from http://survivalblog.com/ which is one of my favorite online indulgences.

  


***

  
In the end, it spread so fast there was no way to know how it happened. By the time the first alarmed reports began appearing on the fringes of the news in the form of blogs and tabloids, before the Associated Press picked it up and it exploded on the wider world of syndicated news, it was too late.

Leonard had been too busy to pay much attention to the rumors, much less the news. Television rotted the brain, in his opinion. The internet was for email. Lately, between the spam offering him millions if he'd only send funds to Nigeria or increasingly dire emails from his lawyer, he wasn't checking even that. Sure, something was happening, but then something was always happening somewhere in the world, be it natural disaster, epidemic, or riot, and he was only aware of it peripherally as a picnicker is aware of a bee hovering around their soda can. By the time the CDC sent out a nationwide warning to healthcare professionals, his first inkling that this was beyond just the usual nickel and dime medical news like e.coli poisoning from undercooked hamburgers at a restaurant chain five states away or simply media scaremongering, it was April 28.

***

A woman was brought into his ER, savaged by what the paramedics and attending police officers claimed was a wild animal. She was in full cardiac arrest by the time they had her on the table, stats through the floor. She died there on the operating table before the paras had even finished shouting out her case history. Not surprising, considering most of her throat had been ripped out, and the rest of her was mostly ground meat.

“Weirdest animal attack I’ve ever seen,” Chapel said as they shared a cigarette outside the loading bay door thirty minutes later. “I did a stint in Tanzania for Doctors Without Borders a couple years back. I’ve seen animal maulings, really bad ones. Once an entire pack of hyenas got hold of a grown man, didn’t leave much more than bones. That, in there? Was no animal.”

“Then what? Think she fell into the gator pool at the zoo?” Leonard ground the stub under his shoe. He was only humoring her, of course; there was nothing much dangerous in the wilds of Atlanta. His mind was only a quarter on the conversation anyway, the rest was nine hundred miles away.

Chapel eyed him. “Divorce not going too good, huh?”

He opened his mouth to say – well, what was there to say? His separation was amicable, as far as divorces could be when one partner had spent his waking hours working overtime at the hospital and his sleeping ones one arm-length away from his pager, and the other partner always wanting….something, something else bigger and farther away with higher society than he, a small town doctor at heart, could even fathom, much less give her. She’d left a year ago for New York. He told people that she was going for her masters there, that it was only a temporary absence, but he and Joss both knew it wasn’t.

All this was on the tip of his tongue to tell Chapel when screams erupted from inside.

The ER floor was slick with blood and viscera. Leonard arrived just in time to see the mauling victim rip the ear off one of his interns with her teeth. He remembered her eyes later, utterly blank and glassy with animalistic hunger, but at the time all he could do was skid to a halt, nearly slipping on the blood, too shocked to process the surreal scene plucked straight from a horror movie before him as Chapel came in the door on his heels and screamed when she saw the horror.

Then in the flood of wide-eyed adrenaline that followed he saw that the vic – what joke that label had become – was hardly the only one enjoying a midnight snack. M’Benga was running towards them, eyes wide, mouth open in a horrified, silent denial of what was going to happen to him, followed by a blood-covered…horde. It was a diverse group, patients dressed in hospital gowns flapping open without care for their own nudity, doctors, nurses, family members in civilian streetwear, but they were all related in the similarity of their shiny blank eyes, and ravenous blood-smeared mouths and hands.

“Get out of here!” Leonard shouted at Chapel, and searched frantically along the nurses’ station for anything more deadly than a letter opener.

As he swung the solid 70’s era telephone that the board of directors had never seen fit to replace into the face of what had been the head trauma surgeon – and his boss -- less than thirty minutes ago, he thought crazily, _I went to medical school for ten years for this._

***

  
The next month was a blur of high-tuned animal instinct. Instead of what should have been a domestic guerilla war in a perfect world with Team Living eventually triumphing over the hordes of evil, from the beginning it was a crash-course in day-to-day survival as prey. The ‘zombies’ were similar to the ones in the George Romero movies only in that they reanimated once dead. But they had a kind of rudimentary animal intelligence, and had a measure of speed impossible in the living state – at least, until the body deteriorated or was damaged beyond function. The pathogen was spread via fluid contact, through broken skin or permeable membranes and could kill someone in short order, which they discovered for themselves with M’Benga, who’d accidentally jabbed himself with a sterile needle earlier that night. A small wound. Insignificant. There hadn’t been much time or thought for blood safety procedures until much later when they were holed up in the freezer of a McDonald’s with the steel door sealed shut behind them.

He’d lost Chapel then, too. She pushed him one-handed out of the freezer with surprising strength, the other arm missing a chunk the approximate diameter of M’Benga’s mouth. He’d shouted and struggled – even if he couldn’t save her, he could…god, what? murder? Euthanize? What word was applicable here? He had nothing. Could do nothing. The blood that had been gushing out in arterial spurts just seconds ago was already coagulating with preternatural speed. Her skin was graying, her blue eyes darkening into murky black, her voice going gravelly and raw even as she shouted him to go, go.

In the end he did as she demanded. The thick bolt made a grinding, final thunk as he slid it home, just as the door shuddered from the weight of a body slamming into it.

He sat there, back against an industrial steel shelf filled with rotting bread, listening to the thumps and the screeches as he dragged in long, sobbing breaths. Eventually he rose and, lacking any other medium, wrote _STAY OUT_ on the door with ketchup.

He left the restaurant by the swinging glass doors decorated with cheerful yellow arches. One door was broken, a star web of cracks radiating from an epicenter illumined in blood and brains that trailed down to a mostly eaten body of an older man. A look of colossal surprise was frozen eternally on what was left of his face.

The sun was rising by then, the roaming, jerking figures melting away with the shadows. Leonard decided it was time to Get the Fuck Out of Dodge. Leave this city of death and the only two people in Atlanta he’d even halfway liked behind, locked in a fast food restaurant they had nicknamed McDiarrhea’s a lifetime ago.

Some god up there had a sense of humor.

That asshole.

***

  
If he didn’t know better, he’d swear he’d died and had been relegated to some purgatorial limbo that was populated by rotting horrors and endless rations of canned soup, MREs, candy bars, and bottled water.

It was purgatory rather than outright hell, because Grandpa Tom had had a ranch in the backcountry of Georgia up near the Tennessee line. He’d been one of the ornery, cynical McCoys. Leonard’s father had always said Leonard resembled him, and not just physically. A true child of the Cold War, Thomas Jackson McCoy had always been sure an apocalypse of some sort would come along because of _them damn liberals in Washington,_ as he’d always put it, and had prepared accordingly. Nuclear war, tornadoes, floods, total economic collapse, civil war, Y2K – it didn’t matter what. Grandpa Tom had prepared for them all.

There was a completely self-sufficient bomb shelter in the cellar, its gun cabinets, pantry and the more conventional pantry upstairs fully stocked, though no one had lived on the McCoy farm in fifteen years. Thankfully Grandpa Thomas had had a realistic streak in him as well. On day three after Leonard’s arrival, and on day two of utter and total boredom – the power was still on, though for god knew how much longer but there was nothing on the sleek hand-cranked emergency radio but static and nothing on the less modern tiny television that Leonard was sure predated his birth but rainbow geometric bars like an acid-inspired Mondrian painting -- Leonard opened a door in a back room and was nearly buried under an avalanche of books.

Louis L’Amour and similar westerns wouldn’t have been his first choice of genre, but they kept him company on the lonely nights as he curled up on his bunk in the shelter, staring at the hideous mustard yellow lineoleum favored in the atomic age, glass of moonshine – grandpa had also had the foresight to install a large distillery in the back barn – in one hand, his machete and loaded sawed-off shotgun across his lap. He wandered in dusty frontier lands, even as he wondered if the planks he’d nailed up over every window and door would hold. The undead came in waves, mostly at night. Sometimes they overwhelmed the perimeter fence, which had never been designed to withstand the relentless hordes of the undead who felt no pain and no fear of the barbed wire. Low groans and the stench of decay, the slide and patter of spongy fingers running across the sides of the house, testing the boards, the door handles. He could hear the thumps and screeches of the undead even through the insulated walls of the shelter. Eventually, he supposed, those would just become part of the normal background noises of night, but until then, he kept his weapons close to hand.

Grandpa Tom hadn’t been too keen on returning books to the library, it seemed, judging from the laminated covers and bar code stickers. As Leonard worked his way further back into the cupboard there were Arthur C. Clarkes, Ray Bradburys, and other sci-fi. “Oh thank god,” he muttered to himself, sorting through the luridly illustrated covers. He stopped short as he came up with – with – the book was a horrifying shade of neon metallic purple, a full-color illustration of a tousled blonde woman swooning in a ridiculously muscled man’s arms adorning the cover. Neither were wearing much clothing, though the man looked like a pirate of some sort. Curious, he riffled through the pages. The plot, judging by a skimmed sentence here or there, seemed to be sex, sex, argument, more sex -- his eye caught on the phrase, _throbbing pole of man-essence_.

Leonard slammed the book shut. “That’s goddamn enough of that,” he said aloud. He’d taken to talking to himself in the absence of company; _sotto voce_ , of course. Nothing drew the zombies faster than sound, and a human voice carried farther than you’d think, and shit, there was nobody else around who’d think he’d gone soft in the head, was there? He had the overtaxed perimeter fence to fix, more water to boil, the back western corner to clear. Too busy to be thinking of the months he’d already spent here alone, in this strange purgatorial state called surviving. He was just lucky he wasn't at the point of talking to a ball with a face drawn on it in blood.

This new world was characterized by silence, the constant background noise of cars, radios, ipods, cell phones, airplanes, computers, all fallen one by one into silence as the land had emptied of the living.

He picked out the book for the week from the closet, and wiped roughly at his eyes.

He didn’t throw away the bodice ripper.

***

  
The zombie had been a middle aged woman, her shoulder length hair stringy and patchy where entire chunks of scalp had sloughed off. She was wearing the surprisingly well preserved remains of what might once have been expensive jeans. Her hands still bore traces of coral nail polish. She lurched along in a seeming daze like a marionette with its strings cut, face turned up to the lowering sky as if in a walking dream but Leonard knew that if he made even the slightest noise she would be on him like a cat pouncing on a mouse. This one was in surprisingly good condition. Maybe she was a fresh one. If she was, she’d be fast, strong. Hard to kill.

He hefted the machete in his hand, testing the balance. The most efficient way to kill an undead was to chop it off at the knees, crippling it, then finishing it off with a precise stab through the spinal cord at the base of the neck as it fell, preferably deep enough to sever the vocal cords. It was a tricky maneuver, requiring precision and timing and Leonard really didn’t want to have to do it. For one, she’d make noise, and that might bring other undead. The street was deserted at the moment, but the fuckers were notoriously good at hiding in unlikely places and popping up when least expected. For two…Leonard was a goddamn doctor, not a zombie hunter, dammit. She’d probably been someone’s mom, or boss, or sister. He didn’t care what she’d come to in this sorry excuse for an afterlife; he wasn’t going to kill anybody unless he absolutely had to.

So he crouched inside the burned out Chevrolet and just watched.

Across the street, there was a Walmart. Inside the Walmart, assuming it hadn’t been looted, were vitamins and water purification tabs and maybe more interesting foods that his grandfather hadn’t deemed nutritious enough to stock, like twinkies, Cheetos, and instant cocoa. His breath fogged in the chilly air and he drew his surgical mask up more snugly over his mouth and nose.

Suddenly, the zombie jerked to attention as she heard – or smelled – something Leonard could not detect and swiveled with eerie, strange grace, staring off over the embankment at the main thoroughfare that ran through the middle of town. Then she growled, the noise raising all the hairs on Leonard’s neck, rising into a savage howl, and loped off.

Was the howl a call? he wondered, not for the first time, unable to turn off that inquisitive part of his mind that he’d cultivated for so long in medical school, that always nosed around for patterns and aberrations that made a case into a candidate for publication in a medical journal. Zombies didn’t hunt in packs, yet solitary predators never advertised their activities for fear their kill would be stolen. The animal metaphor wasn’t perfect, but was in some ways very apt. The undead reminded him very much of sharks. Solitary creatures, they roamed the depths of the ocean in search of food. But when there was blood in the water, they all swarmed in as if to a siren song to tear off their pound of flesh.

And blood in the water there was: another zombie went plodding eagerly past, the thickly sweet aroma of its decomposing flesh preceding and succeeding it, then Leonard heard the loud report of a gunshot.

“Shit,” he growled, hesitating only enough to check that no other zombies were around before vaulting out of the car and breaking into a flat out run, even as another gunshot shattered the air like a dinner bell. At nearly a year and a half after the end of the world the remaining living knew that guns were only effective against the undead in the movies. In actual life, guns made too much noise and guaranteed that every zombie within earshot would come on the run, and the only gun – the shotgun -- with enough power to stop a zombie in its tracks in one go, unless you were good enough to get headshots, also meant a lot of backsplash. Too much risk, even with a precautionary face mask and thick outerwear that left no skin exposed.

And guns were terrible for melee situations, which almost all zombie _oh shit maybe I should run_ situations were.

So either the person firing off his gun like bullets were going out of fashion was a unmitigated asshole idiot of the first order, or they were desperate. But. He’d sworn the Hippocratic oath once, an eon ago. He couldn’t _not_ help if it was in his power, his antisocial, probably more practical than paranoid policy of non-contact aside. He had to be cautious, though; the living generally fell into one of two categories: the hunted, who spent their days hiding and eking out an existence, like Leonard; and the hunters, vicious armed gangs who ostensibly eradicated the undead but rather spent much of their time looting and terrorizing the living. Which was this?

He threw himself flat on the embankment behind a retaining wall of what had once held perfectly tended and geometrically laid out flowers. He peered through the tangle of overgrown weeds, keeping a sharp eye and nose out for incoming undead.

The idiot was running down Hickory Street, taking pot-shots at the growing crowd following him. To Leonard’s amazement, he realized the fool was even _shouting_ at them. Taunting them. How the kid – his eyes weren’t what they once were, but he’d be butched if the kid was over twenty-five – had survived a year and a half in a world that was full of monstrous creatures whose single-minded purpose was to eat him, was beyond him. It was only a matter of time before a crowd came at the running figure from the front and sides too and overwhelmed him. There was no hope of outrunning even one zombie. The undead were indefatigable, unless their body was mostly disintegrated from rot, and single-minded in their hunger.

It occurred to Leonard that he might be witnessing a case of suicide by zombie. Except, he admitted to himself as he continued to gape at the running figure, that didn’t seem to be the case. The kid was picking them off one by one with infinite skill, reloading his semi-automatic pistol on the go, a shotgun and some sort of Japanese sword strapped to his back. Surely there were easier ways to suicide via zombie, leading Leonard back to the conclusion that he was watching the very definition of a pure-d fool.

Except this was December, nineteen months in. Most idiots with guns and more balls than brains had been less than neatly weeded out of the gene pool within the first few weeks. The ones with exceptional amounts of dumb-ass luck had been picked off in the following months.

There was a pattern to this mad dash, Leonard realized. It was as if the kid were….leading the zombie horde away, skipping in and out between cars, dodging the closest ones groping for him as he reloaded, herding them into a compact group. But for what?

Well, laying here and gawping at the circus unfolding before him was more apt to get _him_ chomped. This was no time to ponders the mysteries of the universe and the reasons of crazy strangers. Time to go.

Except now the gunshots were coming closer. Towards _him_. “Definitely time to go,” Leonard told himself, just as the kid leaped off the embankment over Leonard’s head and hit the ground running.

The zombies came then, an inexorable wave of sloughing, gray-green flesh and screeches and moans and that sickening stench of meat left out too long, and before he knew it instinct kicked in and he was running too. One came at him from the front, popping up from a behind a parked Prius. He took its head off as he went, thanking the god he was no longer quite sure existed that the zombie was almost to the point of disintegration anyway so the blade passed through the gristle and bone of the neck as easily as a butter knife through room temperature butter. Following the kid’s honey-colored head because he had no choice now; the horde was upon them and coming from all sides – twenty, fifty, he couldn’t tell, but even three was a crowd when you were being chased. The kid seemed to know where he was going at any rate, looking over his shoulder at Leonard and shouting, “Come on! Inside!”

Inside?

But he found himself obeying anyway. There was something to this stranger, an air of assurance and command – though how Leonard got that just from staring at the back of that bobbing curly head, he couldn’t say -- compelling enough that Leonard followed him through the open side door into the unknown dark.

***

  
“That’s the vegetable garden.” Leonard pointed at the large rectangular patch of turned-over dirt that was nothing much more than a few abandoned late pumpkins and wilted bean stalks. “Over there, the outhouse. Watch the perimeter, you don’t want to get snagged on that. I’ll stitch you up, but I’ll also prescribe you a couple smacks upside the head.” Over the months, he’d reinforced the perimeter fence. It was now two yards thick of barbed wire, disguised with twining smilax vines. Between the knife-sharp metal and the thorns, any overly-inquisitive undead would be shredded past the point of function. At least, that was the idea. He’d never stuck around long enough outside while the undead were staring at him through the fence like he was a plump chicken in a cage, to find out. The number of fence breaches a month had dwindled, at least. Now the fence went over maybe twice a week.

Jim only gazed around the property in silence, nodding in all the right places. He wasn’t bad looking. Downright pretty even, all blue eyes and darkly tanned skin and facile smile, dressed in layers of warm clothing still in mostly good repair that had been available once only in expensive specialty sporting goods stores, that accented his lean, athletic frame. Leonard felt himself even older – though he was only thirty-one – and all scuffs and rough edges next to him. Jim had put away his gun after they’d lured most of the zombies into the Walmart and set it on fire, and now held his sword in its sheath in one relaxed hand. Maybe he’d stolen it from a museum. It looked real enough, with that special sheen weapons got when used regularly, and he still held it at the ready even though they were behind the perimeter. Leonard approved; maybe the kid wasn’t an idiot after all.

Leonard didn’t know what had seized him to offer Jim a place to stay like that. Maybe it’d been so long since he’d seen another living person that he’d become half-convinced he was the only one left alive in the world.

And, night had been coming. To be out in the open at night was a surefire prescription for joining the zombie army, and Leonard had no desire to see this enigmatic, crazy stranger staring back at him one morning through the fence with inhuman black eyes and a terrible smile.

Or maybe, he was just intrigued. Because of the stunt that afternoon that by all rights shouldn’t have worked in real life. Especially because, according to Jim, he’d just been providing a distraction so a young family he’d just met on the road could escape in a hot-wired car. By all rights, that superhero shit only happened in the movies, dammit.

“Maybe you’re just over-thinking all this, you goddamn fool,” he muttered to himself.

“What?”

“Nothing. Come on, I’ll show you the house.”

***

  
“You can have this bunk,” Leonard said, digging blankets and a spare pillow out of the cleverly hidden storage cabinet behind the kitchen table. They hadn't been used or aired in at least a decade, and smelled musty. “There’s water, but you have to pump it out of the well yourself. The airlock gets locked when I go to bed, and there’re no innies or outies after that, so do your business in the outhouse before dark. After that, you gotta hold it or make yourself some sort of chamber pot or piss in a water bottle. An empty one, and don’t you dare spill it in here. Clear?”

“Crystal,” Jim said, smiling faintly.

“And there’s total silence at nightfall.”

Jim kindly didn’t point out that he’d survived over a year and a half on the outside and didn’t need reminding of such basic rules. “Yup.”

“Hmph.” Leonard eyed him. “You hungry?”

As Jim wolfed spam and powdered eggs, Leonard thought of at least a dozen questions, and discarded them all. They were too nosy, too personal, too awkward things one didn’t ask another in a world without a future beyond one day at a time, and the silence between them grew, broken only with the noise of Jim chewing. He was still observing, eyes going flick flick flick, in a way that with any other person Leonard would be afraid that he was casing the joint. When Jim was done inventorying, he turned that icy blue gaze on him, and Leonard shivered. But he saw only honest curiosity in Jim’s eyes and finally Jim asked the question.

“About a year and a half,” he told him. “I spent the two months before that trying to make it to New York.”

Jim gave a low whistle. “Wait, the city? You must have had some serious motivation.”

“Yeah. You could say that.”

“New York’s one of the interdicted zones.”

“Interdicted? By who?”

“The – You don’t know?”

“If I didn’t know, I wouldn’t ask,” Leonard pointed out. “By who?”

“You really don’t get out much, do you?”

“Quit being an asshole,” Leonard snapped. He’d never been an extraordinarily patient man, and living alone for so long had done for what was left.

Jim stared at him for a long time. “Just -- everybody, man,” he said finally. “They nuked the city just after everything went to shit, didn’t give a warning or nothing like that cuz the infection spread too fast. You know. Nobody knows if it was an accident or if some government spook bumped a switch on his way out. Or if it was some pissed-off foreign country, whatever. It’s a wasteland now. That's why there’s no power. Probably the grid would've cut out on its own in four or five months but the EMP killed it early. Knocked out power to the entire eastern seaboard.”

Leonard’s throat felt dry and too tight as he managed, “Any survivors?”

Jim didn’t need to answer that.

The minutes ticked by in awkward silence. Jim finished eating, his fork clattering loud against his plate. Leonard worked on the Budwieser he’d been saving and thought of Joss.

***

  
He was lying awake, listening to the rush of his heartbeat echoing in his ears against the wall of non-sound that was life in a bomb shelter, his eyes feeling like they’d been rolled in sand, unable to just…stop…thinking. He turned over. Punched his pillow a few times.

“I can hear you thinking from all the way over here,” came Jim’s voice from the dark. “Can’t sleep?”

“No, I’m just enjoying looking at the backs of my eyeballs,” Leonard said sourly. “It’s my favorite thing to do.”

“Yeah, no tv, no ipod, no computer, no internet, what else are you supposed to do for entertainment?” and it took Leonard a full minute to decide that Jim was only teasing, the only clue the underlay of a smile in the otherwise flat declarative.

“You could read.”

“Or talk to people. Wanna talk?” Without waiting for an answer, there came a rustle, then footsteps, and before Leonard could even begin to process the fact that Jim was out of his bed and padding across the room, he was there, kneeling by Leonard’s bunk, only a black smudge against more black with the barest illumination from the glow-in-the-dark hands of the clock behind him. The mattress pad dipped a little as he rested his elbows on it. “You know you want to talk to me. People love talking to me.”

“Do they get a choice?”

Jim seemed to pause at this. “Well, yeah, sure. They – you – can either talk to me, or I can just kneel here in the dark staring at you. Me, I prefer the less creepy option.”

Leonard rolled over onto his back. He was smiling like an idiot for some reason.

“Or, we can start with me getting off the floor, cuz it’s not too comfortable down here, I’m telling ya.” A pause. “You could clean the floors more.”

“Are you just going to sit there and talk to yourself?”

The grin was conveyed bright in every word. “I could. Or.” The weight lifted, then a heavier one came down in its place. Jim lay down next to Leonard, all elbows and awkward limbs as he tried to fit himself in, forcing Leonard to turn back onto his side, until they were practically nose to nose on the narrow bunk and Leonard's backside was flat against the wall.

“Comfortable?” Leonard asked, sardonically. Great. He’d let this…this guy into his property, his _house,_ and now his bed, and any attempt at tracing how it’d happened dead-ended into a blur of _huh?_

This weird stranger, who was so very full of vitality and energy and _life_ that he filled the tiny enclosed space of the shelter, seeming to suck the oxygen out of the air every time he gave that dazzling grin as if the apocalypse had never happened. They were very close and now Leonard found himself thinking of the queen-sized bed upstairs, which was so much roomier and comfortable instead of this thin, military-issue mattress pad on a bunk too narrow for two men.

“Who did you leave in New York?” The question was so soft he might have thought it just his imagination, except for the faint breath across his lips. Jim smelled faintly of toothpaste and of living things, earth and vegetation and flowers. In the dark, hurts and complexities that really weren’t complex seemed farther away, so he answered. “My ex-wife.”

At Jim’s silence, he forged on. “Except, I didn’t leave her there, she left me.” Joss might have lived if she’d stayed in Atlanta, was the traitor thought that ran its rat-races in tightening spirals in his head, even if he knew in the logical parts of his brain that chasing down all the permutations of _what if_ of Jocelyn’s death – or worse, her undeath – and assigned blame was worse than useless.

He’d learned that on his way to New York, an impossible 900 mile trek no better than suicide. He’d got through a good piece of South Carolina before he’d been forced to turn back, less from the impassable roads clogged with abandoned and some not-so-abandoned vehicles, every one of them a potential death trap, and more of his growing certainty that he couldn’t help her. No one could have survived. The zombies were everywhere, the few survivors he had seen fleeing south. The cities were dead zones. Best to stay away. As he’d made his way to the farm he saw less and less living as the months passed, and he spoke to none as the living splintered and hid and ran and died, then rose again. The confirmation that he couldn't have helped her even if he'd managed to reach the city, didn't make it hurt any less.

“Where were _you_ going?” he asked Jim in turn. Felt Jim hesitate, obviously preferring to be the one asking questions, not the one answering them. “Nowhere really,” Jim said finally. “General direction of Atlanta, probably. Where-ever there’s food. Or a safe place, if such a thing exists.”

“This is as safe as it ever gets,” Leonard pointed out, feeling the length of Jim against him, warm and heavy and alive. It felt good. “Although I don’t know about food anymore, since you just burned down the local WalMart.”

“That was brilliant tactical strategizing and you know it.” Sleepily. Somehow his face had pillowed against Leonard’s shoulder, into his neck, and the words tattooed themselves into Leonard’s skin.

“Dammit, kid, I was craving some twinkies.”

“Don’t you know that’s bad for you?”

“That shit’ll kill you,” Leonard replied just as deadpan. They burst out laughing. He was still chuckling when sleep claimed him.

***

  
Leonard awoke. The clock on the far wall told him it was three in the morning. He wondered what had woken him.

“Mmph?” Jim said, blinking up at him, conditioning bringing him all the way from dead asleep to totally awake in a millisecond. He’d drooled all over Leonard’s arm.

“It’s too quiet,” Leonard said, listening hard. That was subtly wrong, though he couldn’t place a finger on why.

“What’re the usual night noises?” Jim asked, flipping around and bending off the bunk. He came back up with a buck knife. “You can hear outside noises in here?”

“Yeah. I leave the air vents open. Lets me keep an ear out in case of perimeter breaches.”

“Oh. So it’s too quiet?” Jim yawned. “I’d say it’s nothing to worry about. No zombie amush or nothing. They’re too dumb. And noisy. You’ll never see a zombie ninja, that’s for sure.” He tucked the knife back under the bunk and rolled into Leonard’s arms after pulling the pillow over the wet spot.

Leonard let him, daring even to run his fingers through the thick hair that tapered into the nape of Jim’s neck, all rough cut and uneven from hacking it off with a knife. It was strange how familiar the feeling had become to him, even if they’d only met the day before. “I think I had an app game like that, once,” he said.

“Quit worrying,” Jim mumured even as he stretched like a cat into the touch. “We got them yesterday. Maybe not all, maybe not most. But a lot. Think of it as a holiday. A vacation.”

“A vacation. I could use one,” Leonard admitted. “You think they have zombies in Disneyland?”

“The happiest zombies on earth.”

***

  
One unexpected side benefit of the WalMart – and half of downtown when the flames had spread -- being burned down was that it had taken most of the local hordes with it. Leonard stood on the roof of what had been a very expensive BMW and surveyed the pile of still-smoldering rubble. It was punctuated by white gleams of bone. The air stank sweetly of burned pork.

It was December cold. His breath fogged, but he didn’t pull his mask up to hide it.

He knew it was December because he marked the days on a calendar he’d drawn up himself. It was ridiculous to be following anything like the Gregorian calendar when all such things had pretty much lost their meaning. He knew following the phases of the moon instead would likely be much more useful, but it was hard to let go of this last vestige of civilization and order. He suspected that his calendars, scribbled on the outhouse wall with scavenged pencil, were drifting slightly north of true – a day lost or added here or there – because he could never remember which months had thirty or thirty-one days or when the leap year happened. It wasn’t as if he could just google it.

It was probably the 21st. Or the 30th.

They were totally out in the open with no undead in sight. None. Zilch, zero. He’d never made the five mile trek from the farm to town before in such total isolation. A woodpecker was hammering away somewhere in the woods, overwintering cardinals and blue jays made vivid flashes of color as they flitted across the landscape, arguing bitterly. It had been such a long time since he’d heard the sounds of nature that he didn’t recognize what they were at first. And that, more than anything, assured him that the zombies – at least in the vicinity – _were_ gone. For the moment.

“I’m brilliant,” Jim said beside him, smug satisfaction in every syllable. “You can say it.”

“Yeah,” Leonard said slowly, turning to scan the horizon and the treeline and finally around to Jim, standing there smiling golden against the gray, cloud-laden sky. “Yeah, you sure are.”

He held Jim’s startled face with both hands, stroking his thumbs along Jim’s cheekbones, and kissed him.

Jim’s mouth was warm, and wet. Leonard explored his mouth leisurely, the way he’d been wanting to for what seemed like forever, even though they’d only known each other for two days and one night, remembering the way Jim had turned to him, stinking of gasoline even as they backed away from the searing, intense heat of the fire. He’d been beautiful in the orange glare, wild and vibrant and so very exotic in the stricken silence of Leonard’s life.

By civilization’s standards, this was premature. Too early. There had been no courtship ritual, no first, second, or third date. He knew nothing of Jim except his full name and that his body felt good against his in the dark, and Leonard had never found anyone so fascinating before

Civilization’s rules didn’t apply anymore when you could die tomorrow.

Around them, swirling down from the lowering gray sky, it began to snow. He hardly noticed.

fin


End file.
